North Korea’s supreme leader, the pudgy, 30-year-old Kim Jong Un, keeps issuing nuclear threats from his crumbling peninsula (when he’s not entertaining semi-forgotten NBA rebounders, of course) — threatening to attack South Korea, the United States, and possibly parts of Guam. While nobody’s quite sure how seriously to take this guy, one thing is for certain: the whole ridiculous episode is starting to feel like a bad movie.

Each week for the rest of the year, we'll be posting excerpts from the essays Frank Jacobs wrote for our 60th Anniversary book, Totally Mad: 60 Years of Humor, Satire, Stupidity and Stupidity. Leading off is a piece about the man who started it all, MAD founder William M. Gaines. Be sure to come back next week to read the (partial) answer to the question "Has MAD Ever Been Sued?"

MAD founder, the late William M. Gaines, was a large man who liked large things: Zeppelins (he had dozens hanging from his office ceiling), King Kong (he had a giant Kong head looking in his office window) and the Statue of Liberty (he owned the world’s largest private collection of Statue of Liberty casts).